Posts from 13 November 2014

Today was much shorter, mentally, than the previous days. We had two blocks of programming to do—Mastermind, which I've written in J before and which we mostly knocked out before lunch—and Hangman, which was actually quite a bit more interesting than I expected.

I have to take a moment to say how lucky I got with my partners the first two days. Day 1, I learned quite a few tricks, and day 2 I felt like I was really getting used to a writing in a clean style with my partner. By the start of the day today, I felt really ready to build a clean framework for our code and create some really concise, effective methods to solve bite-sized problems.

Listening to some other groups and reading some of the other tumblr blogs, I can tell that not all groups had such an easy time. Louie and I, though, really found it pretty easy to set out in a direction and digest one task at a time without worrying about the larger scope.

There haven't been any huge surprises on the code end. Still solidifying a lot of the tricks to make code work well—the big ones today were different function signatures for creating objects and playing with Enumerable methods, such as Hash.new(0) versus Hash.new{ |h,k| h[k] = [] } or the different ways to call an inject method. Today was much more evolutionary than revolutionary.